When we began studies on the Somuncurá plateau our expectations of finding abundant zooarchaeological material were great, because we would be working in the collective hunting fields reported by 19th century chroniclers. However, and although we obtained numerous archaeological results, the archaeofaunal record is scarce compared to the abundance of lithic materials, art or stone structures. Thus, the goal of this work is to evaluate the current state of knowledge contributed by this line of evidence to the study of plateau hunter-gatherer societies. For this, we considered the spatial distribution of these items, their archaeological contexts, the faunal structure of each assemblage and the presence of modifications of the bone surfaces in order to evaluate the role played by the different agents (natural and cultural) in the formation of assemblages, their importance for the preservation of this very elusive record in Somuncurá, and, finally, to contribute some trends that allow discussing the use of resources and whether the two sectors of the plateau exhibit differences. The taphonomic results at site scale do not indicate integrity problems that would explain the low frequency of this type of records, and raise the need to explore this problem at larger spatial scales. The zooarchaeological trends suggest that during the late Holocene, guanacos would have been the main species used by the societies that inhabited Somuncurá and that by the mid-19th century, these societies began to use fauna of European origin as a complement, in addition to native fauna.